Cambridge Silicon Radio’s MusiCore
chip combines its Kalimba DSP with a
Bluetooth interface. It replaces a Bluetooth
transceiver while offloading the
host processor’s audio chores, improving
performance while reducing power
requirements. Also, it can directly access
MP3 files in shared, external SD flash
memory for music playback when the
host processor is powered down to provide
battery life on par with MP3 players
(about 100/80 hours for wired/wireless
audio). It can handle transcoding chores
for this mode as well as PCM streams
from the host, delivering Bluetooth or
speaker-based stereo output with performance
that’s better than most phones.
The chip costs about $1 more than CSR’s
Bluetooth-only solution. The development
kit, priced under $2000, includes
host drivers for MusiCore and shared
SD memory access.
www.csr.com
About the Author
William G. Wong
Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF
I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.
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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.
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